Kansas Secretary of State’s Calendar Reveals Discrepancies

Imagine 2050 Staff • Mar 15, 2012

It’s no secret that Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach spends a lot of his time not doing his job, and now the people of Kansas are doing something about it. In February, the coalition KanVote filed a Kansas Open Records Request (KORA) to obtain Kobach’s schedules, calendars, timesheets, etc.—all to document how the purported public servant spends his time. When informed of the KORA, Kobach complacently replied that KanVote “isn’t going to find anything particularly interesting.”

And why was he so confident? Probably because he omitted all of the “interesting” stuff.

In a press conference held today, KanVote revealed that Kobach made little or no mention of his other career: writing and defending anti-immigrant legislation through the nativist Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI). This wouldn’t be such a contradiction if he did this in his “spare time,” like he claims; however, most days that he was known to be working on immigration legislation outside of Kansas—including out-of-state court proceedings—were listed as other tasks on his calendar.

In one particularly odious example, KanVote revealed that, on October 4th, 2011, Kobach’s calendar states that he was to be at home with his wife prior to the induced delivery of their child. In actuality, he was in New Orleans, testifying on behalf of the anti-immigrant ordinance he wrote for Farmers Branch, Texas.

Moreover, KanVote claims that more than six weeks of time are missing from the calendar, i.e., Kobach skipped about a month and a half of work. Combined with his time at IRLI and his excessive media appearances, Kobach doesn’t seem to be doing much that his public office demands of him. The people of Kansas deserve a Secretary of State, not a self-serving ideologue. Whatever his political aspirations, Kobach is not acting in the interest of his state, and Kansans have finally had enough.